The Politics of Affect / Brian Massumi

Politics of Affect

Brian Massumi

The right of Brian Massumi to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2015 by Polity Press

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Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8981-4 ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8982-1(pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Massumi, Brian. The politics of affect / Brian Massumi. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7456-8981-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 0-7456-8981-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7456-8982-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) – ISBN 0-7456-8982-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Affect (Psychology) 2. Political psychology. I. Title. BF531.M324 2015 128′.3–dc23 2014043773

Typeset in 11 on 14 pt Sabon by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Printed and Bound in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

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For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com Contents

Preface vii

1 Navigating movements 1 Interview by Mary Zournazi

2 Of microperception and micropolitics 47 Interview by Joel McKim

3 Ideology and Escape 83 Interview by Yubraj Aryal

4 Affective attunement in the field of catastrophe 112 With Erin Manning Interview by Jonas Fritsch and Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen

5 Immediation 146 With Erin Manning Interview by Christoph Brunner

v Contents

6 What a body can do 177 Interview by Arno Boehler

In lieu of a conclusion 204

Index 216

vi Preface

The ‘politics of affect’: the phrase is somewhat redun- dant. Affect, as it is conceived in this book, is not a discipline of study of which the politics of affect would be a subdiscipline. It is a dimension of life – including of writing, including of reading – which directly carries a political valence. The interviews that follow do not purport to present a comprehensive treatment of the field of affect. Neither do they present an introductory encapsulation – although it is hoped that the dialogic format renders the ins and out of affect more immediately accessible than the aca- demic format. They are an invitation to voyage. Their aim is to map a passage for thinking through the intensities of feeling that fill life, and form it, across its ups and downs. Thinking through affect is not just reflecting on it. It is thought taking the plunge, consenting to ride the waves of affect on a crest of words, drenched to the conceptual bone in the fineness of its spray. Affect is only understood as enacted. This book hopes to

vii Preface enact affect conceptually for the reader through its stream of words. The account developed here makes no claim to objec- tivity or general applicability. What would an objective or general approach bring to the singular qualities of life that compose its affective dimension? Stilling. Dul- lening. Dead disciplinary reckoning. The aim is not to convince with claims of validity, but rather to convey something of the vivacity of the topic: to invite and to incite the reader towards thought experiences pitching off-chart from the pages of the book, on a course of their own beyond its ken. To ‘think through’ affect is to continue its life-filling, life-forming journey. A concept, Gilles Deleuze once said, is lived or it is nothing. The angle of approach pursued here can be described as that of process philosophy in its widest sense. What the thinkers to whose work the discussions regularly return – Henri Bergson, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilbert Simondon, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze – have in common is construing the task of philosophy as understanding the world as an ongoing process in continual transformation. It is not concerned with things – certainly not ‘in themselves’ – so much as with things-in-the-making, in James’s famous phrase. It takes change as primary, and sees the regularities of life as temporary barrier islands of stability in stormy seas. This is the first sense in which the process philosophy take on affect carries a political dimension: what it is primarily about is change. The concept of affect is politically oriented from the get go. But moving it onto a ‘properly’ political register – the arena of social order and reorderings, of settlement and resistance, of

viii Preface clampdowns and uprisings – is not automatic. Affect is proto-political. It concerns the first stirrings of the political, flush with the felt intensities of life. Its politics must be brought out. The conceptual project running through this book is to bring out the politicality of affect, constructing for it an expression that honours its processuality. The immediately political dimension is also built into the base definition of affect informing process approaches like the one enacted through these interviews. This definition, deceptively simple, was formu- lated by Spinoza: affect is the power ‘to affect and be affected’. This definition recurs throughout the book like a refrain. Each time it occurs, it calls forth helper concepts, in increasing variety. These also recur, and together they begin to weave a conceptual web for thinking through affect. The formula ‘to affect and be affected’ is also proto-political in the sense that it includes relation in the definition. To affect and to be affected is to be open to the world, to be active in it and to be patient for its return activity. This openness is also taken as primary. It is the cutting edge of change. It is through it that things-in-the-making cut their transfor- mational teeth. One always affects and is affected in encounters; which is to say, through events. To begin affectively in change is to begin in relation, and to begin in relation is to begin in the event. This brief itinerary already illustrates a characteristic of the processual concept of affect that distinguishes it from the general ideas that are the standard currency of thought, and upon which the traditional disciplines of knowledge are built. The concept of affect is

ix Preface

‘transversal’, in Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of that term. This means that it cuts across the usual categories. Prime among these are the categories of the subjective and the objective. Although affect is all about intensities of feeling, the feeling process cannot be char- acterized as exclusively subjective or objective: the encounters through which it passes strike the body as immediately as they stir the mind. It involves subjective qualities as directly as the objects provoking them, or with which they move. It concerns desire as much as what is imperatively given; freedom as much as con- straint. Thinking the transversality of affect requires that we fundamentally rethink all of these categories in ways that include them in the event, together. It requires honing concepts for the mutual inclusion in the event of elements usually separated out from it, and from each other. A simple mix and match of received categories is not enough. An integral reforging is necessary. This is complicated by the fact that although affect’s openness is unconfinable in the interiority of a subject, to take one of the concepts in need of restaging, it is at the same time formative of subjects. Although affect fundamentally concerns relations in encounter, it is at the same time positively productive of the individuali- ties in relation. In its transversality, affect is strangely polyvalent. Much of the work of the book is dedicated to laying the polyvalent groundwork for this reforging of concepts, transversal to their usual diametric opposition with each other. Such fellow-travelling concepts as ‘differential affective attunement’, ‘collective individuation’, ‘micropolitics’, ‘thinking-feeling’, ‘bare activity’, ‘ontopower’ and ‘immanent critique’ relay the base

x Preface definition of affect with which the first interview begins. Once they introduce themselves, they wend their way through subsequent interviews, taking on greater conceptual consistency, complexifying the concept of affect as they go. This is what a process-oriented explo- ration does: complexify its conceptual web as it advances. It tries not to reduce. It tries not to encapsu- late. It does not end in an overview. Rather, it works to become more and more adequate to the ongoing complexity of life. This means that it does not arrive at any final answers. It does not even seek solutions. It seeks to re-pose the problems life poses itself, always under transformation. The goal is to arrive at a trans- formational matrix of concepts apt to continue the open-ended voyage of thinking-feeling life’s processual qualities, foregrounding their proto-political dimension and the paths by which it comes to full expression in politics (taking the word in the plural). The interviews included in this book are not just dialogues. They are themselves encounters. The inter- locutors are not just questioners, they are accomplices in thought. The interviews typically took place against the background of preparatory exchanges that primed the thinking they would bring to expression. In some cases (chapters 4 and 5), they arose in the context of active collaborations in processual thinking and its political prolongations. These event-based explorations were carried out in the context of the SenseLab, a ‘laboratory for research-creation’ based in Montreal that operates transversally between philosophy, creative practice and activism. My years of involvement in the SenseLab have inestimably enriched my thinking, and my life. The encounters and relations I have experienced

xi Preface in connection with the SenseLab have been transforma- tive – none more so than those with SenseLab founder Erin Manning, my prime accomplice in thinking (and everything else). This book is dedicated to her.

Yubraj Aryal is a Visiting Lecturer in the Comparative Literature and Philosophy and Literature Program at Purdue University, USA. He is also the editor of Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry. He has conducted interviews for the journal of leading thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Marjorie Perloff, Charles Altieri, Robert Young and Laurent Berlant, among others.

Arno Boehler is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria. He is the founder of the philosophy performance festival ‘Philosophy On Stage’. He leads the research project ‘Artist-Philosophers: Philosophy AS Arts-Based- Research’, University of Applied Arts Vienna, spon- sored by the Austrian Science Fund. He has held fellowships at the Universities of Bangalore, Heidelberg, New York, and Princeton. Further information: http:// homepage.univie.ac.at/arno.boehler

Christoph Brunner is a researcher at the Institute for Contemporary Art Research, Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland. His work addresses the relay between cultural and media theory and current discourses on research-creation. His PhD dissertation, ‘Ecologies of Relation: Collectivity in Art and Media’, investigates new forms of collectivity in aesthetic practices between art, media and activism. In 2012 he co-edited the book

xii Preface

Practices of Experimentation: Research and Teaching in the Arts Today. He is a participant in the SenseLab and a researcher on the SenseLab’s ‘Immediations: Media, Art, Event’ international partnership project, and serves on the editorial board of Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation.

Jonas Fritsch is Assistant Professor in the Department of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University, Denmark. His research centres on a creative thinking of interaction design and affect theory through prac tical design experiments carried out at the Centre for Advanced Visualization and Interaction (CAVI) and the Centre for Participatory IT (PIT) at Aarhus. He is a participant in the SenseLab and a researcher on the SenseLab’s ‘Immediations: Media, Art, Event’ international partnership project, and serves on the editorial boards of Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation and Conjunctions: Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation.

Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in Relational Art and Philosophy in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. She is also the director of the SenseLab (www.senselab.ca), a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. Her current art practice is centred on large-scale participatory installations that facilitate emergent collectivities. Current art projects are focused on the concept of ‘minor gestures’ in relation to colour, movement and participation. Publications include Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance

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